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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/30015942">Two Sides Of The Same Coin</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndHerFlowers/pseuds/AndHerFlowers'>AndHerFlowers</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Hunger Games Series - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Canon Divergence, Childhood Friends, Childhood Friends to Enemies, F/M, Hurt, Hurt No Comfort, Mutual Pining, also these are two separate outcomes one has nothing to do with the other plot-wise, and i hate cato's part i'm sorry it sucks muscle through it to get to the good stuff i guess, but not in a cute way, enemies to lovers but not really, fix it but not really i honestly think i made it worse, i love clove's part, i'll try to think of something else to tag, idk i have no excuse for this, major charcter death MEANS major character death, tagged graphic depictions of violence but it's not gore or anything, this is lowkey effed up i'm sorry</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 21:55:33</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,006</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/30015942</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndHerFlowers/pseuds/AndHerFlowers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>She's vicious, he's determined. They will tear each other apart. There's no telling who will win the 74th Hunger Games. You might as well toss a coin.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Cato/Clove (Hunger Games)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>21</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>if you know me irl no you don't</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>HEADS</strong>
</p><p>He’s always been in pain.</p><p>His legs, his calloused hands, his feet, his arms. Ever since he was a kid, ever since he started training, never giving his body a break, never taking time to rest; if you rest, the others will catch up. He’s used to it by now.</p><p>This is a different kind of pain.</p><p>The other pain is: sore muscles after training. Burning lungs on a run. Burst callouses under his spear.</p><p>This pain is: glimmering black eyes. Silver knives flashing across the Arena. His hands around her throat.</p><p>He’s always known it was his destiny to win the Games. He was simply hoping he would now have to go through her.</p><p>He’s learned since then that hope is for fools.</p><p>His victory isn’t unexpected – it’s almost boring. He’s tall, blond, charismatic, a perfect killing machine. Familiar with the feel of steel in his hands, blood on them, too. Boys like him always win. It should be enough to do so, but with the Capitol, just winning is never enough.</p><p>The Capitol demands a spectacle, so Cato gives them one.</p><p>The bloodbath is easy.</p><p>Slow, inexperienced, scared – that’s what the majority of the kids are. Easy to kill, each death little more than the delay of the inevitable. There are exceptions, of course, the other careers, some of the flashier outer district tributes that shouldn’t be an issue. But he’s the best.</p><p>She’s the best after him.</p><p>(Her ghost never leaves. It lingers, a cold breath at the nape of his neck, her silver face, a crown of sleek black hair, jumping out at hum every time he closes his eyes. There was no blood, no blood when he snarled those last words, no blood when he snapped her thin neck, but in his nightmares, it always trickles from her lips, stark red on the backdrop of moonlight. Almost as if he weren’t the one to kill her, but the other way around. Almost as if she ripped his heart out with bare teeth.)</p><p>The clash of weapons, the air of violence, are almost soothing. It’s familiar, it’s what he knows and does best. Nothing but him, his spear, and another life. And another, and another. By day three, it’s routine.</p><p>He saves her for last.</p><p>(He doesn’t know about what could have happened, about how the rules could have changed. Cato is smart – he doesn’t let Lover Boy live long enough for the girl to find him.)</p><p>(It probably wouldn’t have made a difference, even if he did know.)</p><hr/><p>He can fit his whole world inside his palm.</p><p>It’s an easy thing to do when that world is a girl of sixteen, stripped of her knives but not of her pride, the pitch black eyes to lose yourself in still shining, bursting with hatred, with fight, with determination. But not with fear, never with fear.</p><p>It’s an easy thing to do when you’re the last ones left, and your hands are around her neck.</p><p>It should be an easy thing to do to snap it.</p><p>(Clove’s always been better with words of the two of them. twisting, lying, sugar-sweet threats paving her way when sheer power couldn’t. “You’re the muscle, I’m the brain,” she’d say, grinning up to him like a fox, still walking the edge between friend and prey after all those years.</p><p>The muscle, the brain. Two sides of the same coin, one unable to exist without the other. They should have known; they should have known, back then.)</p><p>The absence of fear in her eyes is what gets him in the end, what pushes him over the edge. She was never afraid – it would be almost comical for him to be the first instance, almost unfair. She’s so much greater than that. So much greater than death.</p><p>Why is <em>he</em> afraid, then?</p><p>His childhood is flashing before his eyes, every last shred of innocence lost, her always there next to him, two steps in front of him, and he realizes pain isn’t the only constant in his life; Clove is the second one.</p><p>(Or are those two one and the same?)</p><p>The word “spectacle” is ringing in his ears.</p><p>“Coward,” Clove spits out. “Just get it over with. You always were the weak one.”  Those black eyes are on fire, waiting for him to make the move, to free them of their pat, stalemate position. She hates not being in control, and he knows with absolute certainty – if the roles were reversed, he’d be dead meat by now.</p><p>(A spectacle.</p><p>Make them look. Make them remember.)</p><p>He grins, adrenaline scorching his veins, the buzz of victory pushing aside everything else. She’s just a girl to kill, and they’re just an audience to please. It’s a tale as old as time, and it’s what he was born to do.</p><p>“I loved you,” he snarls, poison injected into the words, “I <em>love</em> you.”</p><p>(Her face contorts, and, if only for a second, fear falls like a shadow over the sharp cheekbones, the freckles dusting her features.</p><p><em>Good</em>, he thinks. She did always condescend him, so sure he could never outwit her, never surprise her.</p><p>The muscle, the brain. The inevitable collapse of one when removed from the other.)</p><p>It’s over in a second. Snapping her neck <em>was</em> an easy thing to do, after all. And as her body falls, thrown aside like a rag doll, there’s nothing in the world but his victory, and his hands are itching for the cold steel.  </p><p>(Taking a life has never been a problem for him.</p><p>It’s what comes after that breaks him, leaving him shivering on the bathroom floor, five years later, screaming for a girl no longer there.)</p><p>(“Clove! Clove, no! Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me, please.” There is so much blood. On his hands, gushing through the wound on her head that was never, in his mouth, nose, eyes. He can’t see. He can’t breathe, he’s drowning in blood. He’s drowning in <em>her</em>.</p><p>“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Clove.”)</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>TAILS</strong>
</p><p>She’s never met an opponent too great for her knives.</p><p>Her entire life has been revolving around one thing, and around one thing only. Winning. Winning in training, winning the Games, winning at life. Leave no prisoners, only a trail of blood and horror. It’s the only way your past doesn’t catch you when you run.</p><p>She’s tiny, pale, a constellation of freckles dusting her nose. Everyone else is huge, bulky, imposing. But they’re slow, so slow. Their muscles always in their way, no tendril iron enough to defend them from the inevitable slash.</p><p>That’s what she does, that’s what she’s known for. She slashes, she throws. She’s the little knife girl from District two. She’s Clove Kentwell. And she is going to win the 74<sup>th</sup> Hunger Games.</p><p>He will not stand in her way.</p><p>It doesn’t matter they used to be friends, before training, before everything. It doesn’t matter she saw his blue eyes shatter for a split second when they’ve been chosen to volunteer in the same years, that her heart clenches at the mere thought of killing him. Cato was no longer a friend. He was an enemy. Everyone was.</p><p>It’s easy, child’s play. The kids are only that – kids. Their blood is warm, their shrieks are shrill, and she is on fire. There is only silver, silver knives and silver stars and the sound of a cannon every time a life has been snuffed out.</p><p>Oh, how vicious she is. How beautiful. There are whispers, in the Capitol – she knows it. Knows what they do to tributes who lose the human in them. So, she makes sure the show is worth her insanity. Let them whisper, let them cower before her, as long as none of them avert their eyes. “Clove Kentwell,” they will say. “She was mad, she was out of control, but she put on a great show. We couldn’t stop looking.”</p><p>The Capitolites are as simple as the children.</p><p>Fire Girl gives her the greatest satisfaction of all the kills. How she carried herself, how she burned, how the crowds cheered for her. <em>Dirt poor, scrapy, a surprise. A spectacle</em>. They were wrong. Clove was scrapy, Clove was a surprise. This girl? This girl was desperate, this girl was <em>terrified</em>. And she was easy to kill.</p><p>In the end, everyone was.</p><hr/><p>She can still hear his scream.</p><p>It’s been two years. She had hoped, prayed it would subside by now, let her go, let her live. But the nightmares won’t stop, and after all this time, she still wakes up screaming, feeling the knife she stabbed into his side in her own body.</p><p>Only ones left, the Arena bathed in blood and the setting sun, adrenaline pumping through their veins, she had made the decision she had been secretly dreading. In the darkest hour of the night, she had been worried – worried she’d be to weak. That after all, she’d fail.</p><p>She didn’t. There was no hesitation in her eyes.</p><p>They’d won already. For the crowds, for the mentors, for him, this was the end. Two victors, one district, history writing itself anew. A decision made for her, making everything easier, everything perfect.</p><p>If only they hadn’t made a monster out of her, maybe she would have been able to accept easy, accept perfect.</p><p>His eyes had been the clear blue of the sky above the District two woods they’d run to play in all those years ago. Her knife was a sliver of the starry night sky.</p><p>Two victors, one district. A girl and a boy. In a different life, they would have been friends. In another, lovers.</p><p>“Clover.” A mocking smirk; a loaded gun. “I always knew it would come down to the two of us.”</p><p>(Those words gave her some twisted sense of solace in the nights after. She managed to convince herself he had known all along, known they wouldn’t both go home. He had known <em>her, </em>once upon a time. She always needed to win.)</p><p>“Cato.” A cruel smile flashing pointed teeth. “We sure know how to put on a good show.” And she had closed the distance between them, barely more than two strides, fast enough to confuse him for a second. It had been enough.</p><p>It had been enough to press her lips against his, urgently, almost violently, giving herself two seconds to melt into his arms, to memorize the feel of him, before stabbing her knife in the soft spot under his ribs.</p><p>A scream. Not of pain, but of anger. Of betrayal.</p><p>(But then, maybe, he hadn’t known. Maybe he really did trust her. Maybe she was mad after all.)</p><p>She had known, right then, the scream would never stop ringing in her ears. Her fingers slick with blood, Cato’s blood, she twisted the knife before yanking it out, letting the blood run freely.</p><p>It was horrifying, how it didn’t feel any different from her other kills. His hands, grabbing for her neck, knowing it’s too late. His eyes, filled with anguish and hatred, erasing everything else, everything that was and could have been, leaving only the knives – in his side, in his back, in his heart.</p><p>This was who she was. Who she’d always been.</p><p>So, she had chuckled coldly, turning her face to the oncoming hovercraft, to the cameras, to the millions of eyes watching her through their screens. The curtain was about to close, her act coming to an end, so she delivered her final line, one that would prevent them from ever forgetting her. She deserved that, at least.</p><p>“Good game. Wanna go again?”</p><p>(Clove never learned they wouldn’t have let them both win. She didn’t know she had only sped up the inevitable that night. They made her a monster, and what difference did it make to leave her to her demons? It only made her easier to control. She had to fear them, more than they feared her. She was dangerous to them.)</p><p>The nightmares never stopped.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>you know how there's a very thin line between "wow this fic gave me chills" and "wow this author needs professional help"? i am actually president of the company<br/>leave kudos comments yada yada you know the drill i thrive on external validation and you liking my writing kinda feels like an adequate alternative for academic success and i need this right now because i got a c in maths xx</p></blockquote></div></div>
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